


For All that We Have

by Lucyemers



Category: War and Peace (TV 2016)
Genre: F/M, Family, Fluff, Love, Marriage, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-23
Updated: 2016-12-23
Packaged: 2018-09-11 12:27:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8979670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lucyemers/pseuds/Lucyemers
Summary: For the prompt, "Natasha and Pierre raising a family together."





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [awkward-elo](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=awkward-elo).



> Exists in the world of the BBC adaptation. I have not read the book so I'm sure this deviates from how Tolstoy ends the novel.

On days such as this he often wakes just at the turning of the sun. On days such as this when the soft sweet golden afternoons follow quickly on the heels of morning and the afternoon creeps slowly and smoothly, and then all at once, into the chill of evening. He wakes beneath the oak, book at hand, where it has fallen, forgotten, as the quiet had lulled him to sleep. 

It's her voice that wakes him. From the door, chiding him gently for nodding off out of doors, or close, humming softly to the tiny Nina in her arms, and today calling out through the parlor window to the boy galloping toward him, shoes kicked off, hair the color of strong tea catching the light of the swiftly the departing sun. “Andrushka!”, She calls, but he does not heed her. He has set his course and it is steady. Pierre braces himself for the child’s descent and feels that familiar punch to the gut as his son leaps into his lap in a fit of giggles.

Andrei never tires of these joyous flying leaps and Pierre doesn't either really, for as much as they are his daily reminders of the happiness that his life has become. 

Andrei has taken off his glasses and perched them on his own nose, another daily ritual of which he never tires. They are comically large on his small round face, and they slip down his nose as soon as he tilts his head forward to touch foreheads with his father. “Do I look like you, Papa?”

“Yes, but much smarter”, he responds. Already having grown bored with the glasses he shoves them back on his father's face and rolls off his lap, crouching in the grass, beginning a quest for insects. 

Pierre watches him. His brows are furrowed in concentration, the wind softly blowing his dark hair out of his eyes, and not for the first time he remembers the child's namesake.Andrei’s face was likewise furrowed all too often. He knows it makes no sense, but he sees his old friend so often in the face of his child. In the way his hair curls softly over his ears, the way the corners of his mouth quirk up just so before he starts to laugh. In another man, in another life, this resemblance might have caused him pain at the loss of his friend, jealousy even, (irrationally so as the child was born nearly a year after Andrei died), but instead of jealousy he feels only a sort of swelling up of emotion,a sort of tenderness. One might call it pain, he supposes, but only the pain of too much felt all at once. 

He reaches out and brushes those unruly curls and he hears Nina’s cries piercing the dusky quiet. “Andrushka!” Natasha calls once more. “Your mother's calling you,” he says pointedly.

“Pierre!” she continues “And you too, Papa” Andrei says, peering up at him with near comical solemnity as he places a caterpillar on his knee. 

“Come inside! It's getting cold.” 

“Let's leave your friend to his home, Andrei”, he says as he sits up and takes the caterpillar gingerly from his knee returning him to the ground, “and we shall return to ours.” Andrei leaps up and starts running toward the door, his energy nearly never spent.

Later when the nurse has tucked Nina and Andrei into bed and he sits by the fire, surfacing from his book to find that Natasha has fallen asleep, her head in his lap, he recites his nightly catechism in his head. 

It is so sentimental, he never dare speak it aloud for fear she would laugh. And though he knows his prayers should be addressed to god, the words in his mind are always to her, 

Natasha, I am blessed by your smiles, by your sighs, by your frowns, by your tears and your laughs. For all that we have, for all that we have had, even for what we have had and lost, for our daughter, our son, the life for all of us to come, I thank God. 

She stirs, he bends down and kisses her eyelids before they flutter open. When she sees his face just above her she tilts her head up to kiss him softly and slowly, leaning in so he can feel her sighing gently. They have all the time in the world.


End file.
